Quantity or quality in Google+ authorship?

[TIBA]

Hi folks, here goes a (hopefully) easy one for the local authorship gurus.

For our blog content strategy we currently have two inhouse contributors. Both have decent Google+ profiles and one is in the process of really establishing authorship/influence by submitting guest posts to several industry sites, sharing content in Google+, engaging in conversations in twitter, etc. Posts by this latter contributor already rank page 1 for the main keywords.

We now have a new content contributor who is a retired employee from the company and a good friend. He has written excellent content that will be published in our blog in the coming few months. He does not have a Google+ profile but he can have one if we ask him to, but he is not going to use it for anything other than writting on our blog. He does not mind having his content published under any of our current Google+ profiles.

Question: should we include this new content under our current profiles or should we create a new Google+ profile for this new contributor knowing that it will be an 'empty' profile?

Thanks in advance!

[TIBA]

Thanks Michael for your quick reply. I think I'll go with your suggestion of establishing a Google+ profile for him.

Anyone else in favor or not of Michael's opinion?

[MichaelC-15022]

I'd be inclined to build him his own G+ profile.  If it's great content, and people are actually going to read it an interact, then you really don't want anyone to get any sense of deception/dishonesty about who the writer is.

And while AuthorRank isn't officially accepted by SEO experts as being "in play" in the algo yet, I'd say we're probably universally agreeing that it's EXTREMELY likely to be used in the not-too-distant future.  And we're of course not certain exactly how all of the factors play together, however, I would expect that author diversity for a site would be a good thing in the algo (i.e. as an indicator of the size/breadth of the company....do you want Google to think you're just 2 guys working out of your basement?).  And if the content is really good, it'll get shared by others out there, which will undoubtedly help to build the strength of that G+ profile in Google's eyes, despite that author only writing for 1 site.